Once a year the Swiss and German sister towns of Laufenburg are connected with a carnival. Napoleon split the town in two back in the 1800s and they have been separated by the River Rhine ever since.
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Thomas Kern was born in Switzerland in 1965. Trained as a photographer in Zürich, he started working as a photojournalist in 1989. He was a founder of the Swiss photographers agency Lookat Photos in 1990. Thomas Kern has won twice a World Press Award and has been awarded several Swiss national scholarships. His work has been widely exhibited and it is represented in various collections.
It is dark and cold at five o’clock in the morning. From a distance you hear the rhythmic, monotonous and metallic clanking of the “Tschättermusik”. The eerie music gets louder until you reach the middle of the procession in which the revellers use saw blades on old pans and other metal objects. It’s Thursday, the so-called “3 Faissen”, the day the carnival officially opens.
The madcap cross-border procession has for centuries connected the twin German and the Swiss towns of Laufenburg. It’s a unique occasion. As part of the pre-Lent Swabian Alemannic Carnival celebrating folklore in Switzerland, southern Germany, Alsace and Vorarlberg, the carnival was included in UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2014.
Today it is one of the oldest carnivals in southern German region still going. The star turn is the oddly named Narro-Altfischerzunft 1386 guild, in a ceremony featuring a large model salmon, once fished in large quantities.
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All of them figure on the list of 167 living traditions recently put online by the Federal Cultural Office as part of Switzerland’s implementation of the Unesco Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage which it ratified in 2008. Three or four of them will later be submitted to Unesco for inclusion on a…
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On a chilly day in mid-February, the sounds of pipes and drums echo across the plaza in front of Basel’s main exhibition hall. Inside, adults browse stands from area merchants at the Muba fair, an annual trade show all about Switzerland’s third-largest city. But outside, children are learning about one of the city’s oldest traditions,…
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A colourful and festive time of the year, the dazzling winter carnival tradition with its parades, loud music and people dressed in masks predates Christianity and celebrates the coming of Spring. Here the main attractions. Basel: 13.03.2011 – 15.03.2011 www.basler-fasnacht.com Bern: 11.03.11 – 12.03.11 www.fasnacht.be Fribourg : 04.03.11 – 08.03.11 www.carnavaldesbolzes.ch Lötschental : 03.03.11 – 05.03.11 www.loetschental.ch Lucerne :…
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